Referring to the painting, Herrera insists that “the marriage was at the center of her life” by pointing out that the hands held together by Kahlo and Rivera are placed at the center. This is a point of view claiming that Kahlo strictly limited her feminine identity to a homely character. According to Herrera’s interpretation, Rivera is depicted in relation with his job, a painter, and a meaningful official role, contrasting with that of Kahlo. Her interpretation emphasizes the difference between husband and wife, and male and female. The husband Rivera is active, whereas Kahlo is passive. Instead of obviously staring at or strongly holding the hand of Rivera, Kahlo is slightly tilting her head toward Rivera. Herrera explains this painting clearly based on the concepts of active masculinity and passive femininity (Herrera Hayden, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, 1993).
Clearly, Frida and Diego Rivera (1931) (Figure 5) is a piece that challenges the discourse of feminine identity that is already fixed in people’s minds. The discourse that defines Kahlo stresses the dichotomized categories of husband–wife and official
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The piece My Birth (1932) (Figure 24) candidly describes childbirth, which is tabooed (Ankori Gannit, 2002). The expression of women’s private world in Kahlo’s paintings played an important role for her art to receive high praises. However, Kahlo’s appeal is a sad monologue of her pain, as the praises were not only those for a unique experience only women undergo but also a confession of painful experience of an infertile woman who cannot bear a child, which is naturally granted to a woman. In this painting, Kahlo did not want to secretively paint or beautifully cover the female organ; instead, she confidently claimed that women’s natural feature is personal and private and not an object to boast its beauty in hidden places because of the absence of a